


Feels so good to feel again

by Trojie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Hallucinations, Infection, Injury, M/M, Unrequited Wincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 01:14:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pain keeps Lucifer at bay, at least to start with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feels so good to feel again

**Author's Note:**

> For my hurt/comfort bingo card, prompt _septicaemia/infected wounds_. Jfc I need to stop writing about these boys cutting themselves up. 
> 
> Beta-read by Kissyn, the great and glorious.
> 
> Title from 'Verse Chorus Verse' by Nirvana - _you're the reason I feel pain / feels so good to feel again_

'So, what I don't understand is,' says Lucifer, leaning back against the countertop in Bobby's kitchen and flicking at dust motes from the sunlight slanting in through the window, 'why you, Sam Winchester, who've been chasing things other people can't see your entire life, think that if you ignore me, I'm gonna go away.'

The sunlight shines his hair to gold, fake like iron pyrite, the glitter in an old drunk's pan. Sam turns his head and watches the light falling on Dean's back instead. It changes olive-drab to a true green, just for a moment, changes Dean's black tee shirt hem to dusty grey.

Dean's hanging over a chair back, straddling the seat the wrong way round, watching Bobby paw through books. There's a bottle of beer dangling from his fingers, almost empty. He must feel that he's being watched, because he turns over his shoulder to look at Sam for a glance that's almost too long to be called that. Their gazes lock, eye-contact catches, but then they stutter and slide free like a screw that's threaded itself, as if they can't hold any longer. 

Lucifer stands by Dean, and smiles. 

'Stop looking for metaphors, Sammy,' he says, 'there's no point. The truth is out there. All you gotta do is look.' Lucifer twiddles his fingers at Dean like he's casting some TV show's idea of a spell on him. 'You can see it just the way I can. You're breaking his heart, little Sammy, staring off into space like you do. He's a fixer, your brother, but he doesn't know how to fix you.'

Sam grits his teeth, and hurts himself, and the voice goes away. 

His hand throbs, a dull, constant ache that he's learning to ignore, the way he always ignores injuries that aren't gonna kill him. Dean showed him how to use that, folded his fingers around the wound in his palm and squeezed. Reality _hurts_ , that's how you know it, that's what Winchesters understand better than anyone.

'Oh, Sam,' says Lucifer, over his shoulder this time. Sam never really sees him move. 'Is life really that bad? Is that your little rule of thumb; if it doesn't hurt _at least this much_ , it can't be real? That's a sad, sad way to live, Sammy.'

And then Lucifer leans close, so close Sam would swear he feels warm breath in his ear, and whispers, 'You know I _could_ make things hurt, if I wanted to, don't you?' There's a smile in his voice. 'But I want you to be happy, Sam. Why won't you let me make you happy?' He looks at Dean, looks back at Sam, so close their foreheads could touch. 'It's all right there, Sammy. Yours for the taking. With me on your side, you can have whatever you want.'

It _doesn't_ make Sam happy, to think there's something there when there never could be. Sam prefers the truth, what he knows happened, over Lucifer's lies. Even if it aches. Even if it tears him apart. It's better than doctored memories and twisted dreams, dangled in front of him in a cage.

'I think you're misrepresenting me here, sweetheart,' says Lucifer, almost pouting. He sighs into Sam's hairline. 'Everything happened the way I showed you - I just took your blinders off, that's all. I wouldn't lie to you, Sam. I never have.' He nods at Dean across the room, now staring at a newspaper intently and blatantly hyperaware of Sam's movements. You don't have to look at someone to watch them. 'See, Sammy? You and him, you'd be at it like rabbits if you weren't so hung up on Right and Wrong. I could give you that.'

Sam digs his thumb viciously into the hot, puffy mess he's made of his hand, and Lucifer recedes under the pain. But a thin trickle of red comes away when he lets up the pressure, and when he looks closely he realises one of Dean's careful, ugly stitches has torn through. The pain stays longer this time, lingers until the blood dries up, and Sam's so grateful for that reprieve, even just for ten minutes, that he doesn't tell Dean. And even later on, when he has the opportunity, he doesn't dress the tiny wound. Because it works, because it keeps Lucifer at bay, so Sam's going to keep it.

Dean watches him, and Sam can't do anything about it but try not to stare at things he knows aren't real, try to be more subtle. He starts hiding his hand in his sleeves or his pockets, clenching his fingers into a fist to put hot, stinging pressure on the wound when he needs it. Lucifer protests, but he can't hang on when Sam's thoughts are all filled with sweet, sharp hurt, physical and actual. 

Because the Devil can't hurt him like this - he disappears when Sam chokes an angry noise into his gritted teeth and digs his nails into the meat of his hand. And if Sam hurts himself hard enough, makes the pain last, then Lucifer doesn't come back, not until Sam lays his head down to rest.

They've left Bobby's by the time it all starts going wrong - there's nothing on the radar, they're blowing in the wind, but it's better, moving. Sam can watch the road, watch the Impala eat up the white lines til he hypnotises himself, listen to Dean tapping the wheel in time with the radio, and pretend he doesn't need to sleep. 

Their first night back in the saddle, leaving Bobby in the rearview mirror with a sour expression under his hat and over his worry, they find a motel - cheap, extra cockroaches - and Dean strips to shorts and undershirt, shoves his knife under his pillow, and folds into sleep so fast, so deep, it's like he's been knocked out.

Sam tries to follow him. He does. He lies down on his side, away from Dean and away from the luminous numbers on the alarm clock in between their beds, and tries to sleep. He lets the throb, burn, pulse of his hand lull him into a doze, like a metronome, a heartbeat monitor, telling him that everything is fine. 

But Lucifer is leaning over him, curled over Sam like a lover, and when Sam rolls over as hard as he can, as if he could dislodge the Devil, he ends up facing Dean, with Lucifer crooning in his ear about what he's missing out on, what he _deserves_. 

And then he shows him. Sam knows visions, knows hallucinations, knows premonitions - he's had them all, and this is something from all three columns; it's a hallucination, because he can taste Dean's skin, get the tactile sense of them together, hear desperation in their breathing, in their cut-off moans and half-whispered pleading; and it's a vision, because it can't have happened, ever; and it's a premonition, because it's insistent, it takes him over, it has to be heard, it tells him that this, that Dean and he are going to be - whether he likes it or not. 

'See, Sammy?' says Lucifer, soft in his ear, breaking the spell. 'Why won't you believe me?'

Sam claws at his wound like a frightened animal, and he's alone in his bed again. He scrambles to a sitting position, chest heaving, hair hanging lank and sweat-damp around his face, and curls, hunches around his hands where they're locked together. Bleeding.

In the morning, Sam untangles himself and actually looks at the damage he did in his panic. Two more stitches have given way, and the ragged edge still bleeds sluggishly when touched. His hands are covered in the evidence, but he's alone in the bathroom, and in his own head, when he washes them clean. They sting. 

A week, three different motels, a few hundred miles of road, the stretched and ruined end of Dean's third second-hand copy of _Bad Company_ by Bad Company on cassette, and Sam doesn't stop gouging at himself, like a rat with an electrode in its head, pushing its own buttons. And then the blood stops coming, and instead there's fluid, clear or white, or yellow, and Sam's baseline on reality notches up. Lucifer has to shout just to be heard. Sam could weep for relief. 

But the pain gives way to itching, clawing its way up Sam's wrist, and Sam knows it's the beginning of the end.

Lucifer asks him, angry-desperate-pleading like the good Samaritan talking Sam down off a ledge, if he really thinks this is doing any good. It's in the dark hours before dawn in motel number three, and Sam's looking at his mangled hand, trying to see a way through. 

'You're just making yourself sick, Sam - this isn't healthy.' Lucifer sounds sincere and concerned. Sam visualises stabbing him with Cas's knife, right up under his sternum, into his chest-cavity, watching that burning white light take him away like bleach down a drain. He worries at his wound, thinking about doing that, about killing the Devil. 

Blood and worse wells up around his digging fingers. Sam's not stupid, he knows he needs to clean it up, but it's hard to let go of your safety line, even when it's tangling round your neck.

They've got no goddamn disinfectant and no salt to spare, and so Dean catches Sam trying to pack his failing sutures full of a paste made out of complementary motel sugar packets boiled up in the kitchen at four am, with only his Maglite to see by. 

'What the hell are you doing?' Dean demands, wild-haired and wild-eyed, his tattoo inching out from under the soft, worn collar of his shirt. He stalks up to the kitchen counter and grabs Sam's hand, pulling it into the pool of light on the stained Formica. He smells warm, soft, the way Sam vaguely remembers actual sleep being.

'Now's your moment,' says Lucifer in Sam's ear. 'Don't make me start singing songs from Disney movies at you, Sammy.'

Sam twitches. 

'I'm - I've just got a bit of - look, just let me fix this, okay,' he snaps, yanking his hand back. He can't bring himself to meet Dean's eyes so he looks away instead, and Dean growls. 

'Is _he_ talking to you right now?' he demands. 'Look at me, Sammy.' 

Sam does, cradling his bad hand up close to his chest, unable to shake the feeling of being a hunted animal under his brother's gaze. 'Dean, I … I -' 

'Gimme that,' Dean says, gruff, but gentler. He pulls Sam's hand back again and uncurls his fingers, hisses at what he sees. 'Jeez, Sammy. What did you _do_?'

'It helped,' Sam says, helplessly. 'It - _ah_ \- it kept him out, like you said -'

Dean pushes Sam's hand down on the countertop. 'Yeah, well, what good does it do you if you lose your freaking hand, Sam?' He scowls at the wound and then pads off into the darkness of the bedroom. 

After all these years, Sam's used to the sounds of Dean rifling through his duffle in the dark - the muddy noises of denim and flannel being shoved aside, the clink of belt buckles and knives. He grits his teeth and keeps his hand where Dean put it. 

'Figures, you'd take his advice over mine,' says Lucifer. He's standing in the blue halo of the light the Maglite's casting, just in Sam's peripheral vision. 'I know you wanna trust him, Sam, but he doesn't trust you. He doesn't love you anymore, Sammy,' Lucifer sing-songs. 'He's just going through the motions til he can figure out what to do with you. You weigh him down.'

He's changed his tune - he knows he's losing. Dean's not a bribe anymore, he's a threat, and Sam glories in it, stares at his hand, wills his heartrate higher to feel the pressure of his pulse in the swollen mass of his palm - _thump, thump, thump_.

'It doesn't have to hurt like this, Sammy -'

'This is gonna hurt, Sammy,' says Dean, coming back into the kitchen, wiping a stiletto knife on the hem of his sleep shirt. 'No two ways about it. But I gotta open that sucker up to clean it out.'

'I know,' Sam says, low in his throat. He needs this, more maybe than he could ever say - Dean's hands on him, caring for him; Dean's sure way with a blade. Sam trusts those things, will always trust them, long after everything else is gone.

Lucifer blurs and fades under Dean's knife, boiled clean and still hot, cutting the stitches free. Then there's warm salt-water, because Dean refuses to prioritise their defences over Sam, slopping onto the counter and wetting it pink. Dean pulls his shirt off and rips it to strips - the thin fabric doesn't even need a knife, it tears like paper - and Dean takes the sugar paste Sam made and slathers it in, ties it up tight. 

'Should clean it up,' he says. 'Couple of days' time, we can stitch it up again. But you gotta take proper care this time, okay?' He's got his serious face on. He looks so much like Dad, but Dad never had that cold edge Dean gets now, like hope is something that happens to other people. Dad ran on revenge, Sam knows; Sam understood that, even if he understood nothing else about the man. He never had hope to start with. But Dean used to run on it. 

Sam doesn't know what Dean runs on now. And Sam's got nothing left but fear, and even that's being ground away under pressure. Both of them, their gas-tanks are draining dry. 

And now Sam's one weapon's gone. 'I needed it,' he whispers, as if that's an explanation for daring blood poisoning, for making himself a liability. 'I needed to feel -'

'What do you need to feel?' Dean demands, cutting right in. 'What do you need? You need to hurt, Sammy? This doesn't hurt enough for you?' He pushes right up, like he wants to get between Sam and the world. 'This whole fucked up situation doesn't rip you apart? Because it's killing me, Sam,' he says, and his voice cracks. 'It's killing me.'

'Dean,' Sam pleads, his hurt hand jammed between them, picking up his heartbeat. he wants to bury his face in Dean's neck, hide, beg him to understand. 'Of course it hurts,' he says. 'Worse than anything. But it hurts here,' he says, presses shaking, red-smeared fingers to his temple. 'And - and he can fake that.'

'I don't fake, Sam,' says Lucifer, stage left, a teacher gently rebuking a naughty pupil. 'I just reframe.'

'Oh yeah?' Dean growls. He takes Sam's bad hand and holds it to his chest, to the breadth of his sternum, and Sam feels the feedback of Dean's own thumping heart in counterpoint against his pain. 'Can he fake this, Sammy? Huh? Can he fake me?'

Sam leans their foreheads together and Dean cards his fingers through Sam's hair; rough, firm, possessive as Hell, and Sam breathes Dean's air and lets his big brother hold him, and says 'No.' And just for a second, it works. 

But Lucifer's in Sam like a fever, the heat in a dirty cut, like the red streaks that reach towards your heart when you've scrubbed and cleaned and yet there's too much filth inside you to ever be got out. He's watching them from the outside of the ring of light they're standing in, and he's smiling. This is what he always promised Sam, after all. 

The second they move, they shatter that protective circle of torchlight, he'll be back. There's no peroxide for this, no iodine. There's no cure for being the Devil's meat-suit. Sam invited him in.

And now Sam's infected.


End file.
